Let me review for a moment and then we'll go on directly with some texts of Erinnaeus Last time we did two things. John gave a resume of Erinnaeus' theology based on a vision of God. Remember coming from Lasky's book, The Vision of God. So that notion of vision of God is almost identical with Erinnaeus' notion of gnosis. It starts out from faith and it moves through a kind of gnosis, a kind of knowledge, and it ends up with the vision of God that we've become accustomed to call the beatific vision of heaven. So Erinnaeus is a very unified thinker. He's really synthetic. He loves to pull things together. So the vision of God embraces all of that. It's the end of our life but it somehow begins here below. And there are a lot of beautiful and very concise, powerful texts connected with that vision of God. We'll probably run across them again as we go through Erinnaeus. The other thing that we did was to look at that Valentinian Gnosticism.

[01:24]

Because if we set out to study Erinnaeus in his books against the heresies, that's what he's fighting basically, is Valentinian Gnosticism. Which, as I said, is a kind of deluxe kind of Gnosticism, a poetic elaboration which, however, completely bypasses the core of the Christian mystery. That curious thing that I put on the board is an attempt to express the salvation scheme of Valentinus in the way that Erinnaeus has it, and then to express Erinnaeus' own version. So just to lighten the load of mystery, I'll say something about it now in a little bit more detail. This over here is Valentinus, okay? Remember, this looks like a circuitry. It looks like some diagram for the next transistor. That's Hugo. Is that what it is? Have I got the right colors?

[02:26]

I think so. Okay. Remember, Valentinus has God up here, and the bishops, which means death. And then he's got silence over here, and then he's got noose over here, which is mind, or intellect. That's what it means by intellect. And then he's got logos over here, and he's got, what's he got? He's got truth. Now, this is noose here, logos here. Truth, life, and he's got man and church down here. And that's his first argument. And then he generates two more sets of these things, one of which has 10, and one of which has 12. And these are all things, because they're worlds. They're worlds. And there's some kind of archetype, which explodes into a whole new sphere of development. It can be quite an exciting scheme. And we still haven't got to the creation, because this is all on the spiritual level. It's a little like witness, in that respect. I know very little about the spiritual level.

[03:28]

And then putting the creation down is an interior creation. Then, the last one of these, remember, is Sophia. And she has some kind of a desire to see God. And that desire, in some way, becomes a kind of stray element, and breaks out of this separate energy of God, which is the divine, the divine spirit, including all these other things. So, her so-called primacy, or desire, or purpose, or thought, or intention, or however you translate it, breaks off and becomes this Akamoth, which is, in the Hebrew word for wisdom, the Zodiac Greek word for wisdom, and Akamoth is Hebrew for wisdom. That thing breaks off and gives rise to a demiurge, which is... May I have a look? This is Sophia, this is Akamoth. And the demiurge should be in the same color as the divine spirit. See, the demiurge is the one which is not related to creation.

[04:33]

This is the creation element, it's the world, the creator creation element. And so, this and this are supposed to be generated, as I said, this and this are both Christ. And God has split into those two parts. And then you've got the generation of Christ in the Holy Spirit, from this noose, from this mind-wheel, which is supposed to be in here first, and then you've got Jesus coming out of the Purim as a Savior. So you've got two Christs, or two second persons, and two gods. And the creation is now here, and it's got three levels to it, so it's enormously complicated. And I've got it inaccurately drawn, but what I want to illustrate is the complexity of it. And then, the simplicity of Pyrenees scheme, which is something like this. Here's God with his Logos within him, think of it in that way. And God with his, as it were, the Word, which is in the bosom of the Father. Here's the creation. The Logos is sent into the creation, and is born inside the creation.

[05:35]

The Logos is born in the world. Remember, the Logos became flesh and blood from Moses. Now, the Logos is born in the world, but at the same time, the world is sort of born in the Logos. The world is recreated in the Logos. One reason for having this cross here is because the two circles exchange. Each one is sort of inside the other. The smaller circle, which is the Logos, but which really contains the world, because the world is created in the Logos. The creation here comes out of the Logos. So if the Logos is born in the world, the world is also in the Logos. And then finally, the Logos picks up the creation and carries it back into God. Carries it back into God. I haven't tried to show the Holy Spirit. Let me get in touch with the Holy Spirit. So you get the idea. The Holy Spirit is the cross. It is in a way, because it is... The Logos is the circle, the Holy Spirit is the cross.

[06:38]

I don't know if I say that, because if I wanted to say that, I could have made the cross come all the way out. But you could have not. To fulfill the Spirit of God. Traversing the whole distance between Logos and God, the Father, between Love, between the creation and by the Father, or between the creation and all the fullness of God, the same whole distance. This is only very approximate. It's a crude scheme. But you can think about it. I mean, it's possible to think of it in another way. What I want to do is compare the complexity of the other scheme, and also the incompleteness of it, insofar as all of this is not very likely to occur. It's only the spiritual part. This is where the top layer is skimmed off, and brought back up here, into the Divine. This middle layer finds a kind of limbo, and you remember the lower layer of the creation goes into that fire of ignorance, where it is fundamentally integrated. So, we'll come back to that later.

[07:39]

You mean the Gnostic scheme? What happens is that those ladders creep back in. The mediation comes back in and separates you from God instead of joining with God. See, for Irenaeus, the mediation of the Logos brings you inside God. It unites you with God perfectly, with nothing in between. The trap that always happens is that the mediation which is supposed to unite you ends up by separating you. It forms a wall, or forms a ladder of different grades. And it happens inside the church. And then you get things like the Protestant Reformation, which tried to re-establish the unity by wiping out the mediation. And that sends us on a whole other journey then. Because you can't get it back together that way, by wiping out the mediation of the church, or of the Logos. I didn't put anything about the church in there. But the church and the Logos were almost... Almost... Let me see. Almost equivalent.

[08:47]

You could almost represent them in the same figure. I think that the church and the Logos are very much one. That's... That building is very much one. Then the Holy Spirit enters it. And the Holy Spirit contains the Logos. That's all creation. That's right. But remember, the bigger circle is God. It's not creation. So... And the creation is already inside the Logos. And it's impossible, in a way, to distinguish the Logos from the Spirit. Okay? Because... In the sense of figures. Because the Logos and the Spirit are, as it were, the same... Have the same extent, which is infinite. Okay? Whereas the word which is spoken, the expressed word, or the taught doctrine of the church, or the visible church, is not coterminous with the Spirit. But the Logos is. And so, that's what makes it difficult to distinguish the two, with the figure of the building. It is very much true, I think, to say, at least up to figure 2, that Athanasius had the same fellowship. But for both Irenaeus and Athanasius,

[09:50]

there's still not a very clear doctrine where the Spirit is much better taught by them. Not really taught down to what you get in the body. Trying to separate the specific things you have to say. Irenaeus puts all his weight upon the unity of God the Father and the Creator, and upon the unity of the Logos, which is Jesus. All the weight is there. And the central weight, I think, is upon the Logos, because that capitulates to that. And the Spirit is there as the one who leads you to Christ, who leads you to the Father. And as the wisdom of God. But he doesn't say a lot more about the Spirit. We'll see as we go along. So, the tricky thing about Irenaeus is his simplicity, in a way. And he keeps repeating the same things. And so, what he does is he sort of... And you see the simplicity and the beauty of the mystery. Remember, when von Balthasar writes a theology of beauty, he starts with Irenaeus, because he says that Irenaeus is the first theologian who saw kind of that radiant beauty of the Christian mystery.

[10:55]

And so, the unity and the simplicity of it, against another kind of beauty which is in the Gnostic community, which is a poetic beauty and a kind of pluralistic wonderland. But when you lose the simplicity, and when you can't get it all back together again, it's really by comparison that we see how beautiful God's work is. And that's what Irenaeus is saying all the time. It comes out in this first text that we have. He's really talking about how beautiful God's work is. Beautiful in its simplicity. Let me read a little something first, before we get to our first text, which is in Book 1, Chapter 10. This is quoted in Boyer, and it's a letter that Irenaeus wrote to a priest who had been tempted by the Valentinian Gnosis. This is in Boyer, on page 225. These opinions, Florinus, that's the priest's name, to speak moderately are not those of sound teaching. These opinions are not in accord with the Church,

[11:59]

and they impel those who believe in them into the greatest ungodliness. And so he goes on. And then he talks about where he gets his knowledge of the faith. For I used to see you near Polycarp when I was still a child in Asia Minor. Polycarp, he was a disciple of John. Now, what I want to point out here is that Irenaeus is in the tradition of John. He's in the Joannine tradition, and so we're going to find a continuity between John's doctrine of the Logos, in the Prologue, his doctrine of the Word of God, and Irenaeus. I used to see you near Polycarp when I was still a child in Asia Minor. This priest must be elderly. And you were a star at the Imperial Court and eager to have Polycarp have a good opinion of you. Indeed, I remember the events of those days better than what has happened since. For what we learn as children grows with the soul and makes one thing with it. So I can describe the place where the blessed Polycarp used to sit and speak. This marvelous old man, this bishop who was a martyr. You've probably read or heard the martyrdom of Polycarp.

[12:59]

How he came in and went out, his way of living, his physical aspects, his public conversations. How he spoke about his relationship with John and the others who had seen the Lord. How he remembered their words and the things that he had heard them say about the Lord, his miracles and his teaching. How Polycarp has received all this from eyewitnesses of the life of the Logos. From eyewitnesses of the life of the Logos. So it's this tradition of John. So it's the word, the Logos is walking around and people are watching his life and remembering it and setting it down. And everything is centered in that. The creation in all of history is going to be recapitulated in that Logos has been walking around among men. And reported it in accordance with the scriptures. At that time also by the Lord's mercy I heard those things eagerly and I noted them down, not on paper but in my heart. And always by the grace of God I have faithfully pondered them and I can testify before God that if that blessed and apostolic old man had heard anything like this, he would have cried out and snapped his ears and so on.

[14:02]

This horror of something that really loses the truth and goes off after something else. Okay, let's look at our first text, which is Book 1, Chapter 10. And remember in the first nine chapters Irenaeus has been just setting out this whole heretical, this whole pseudonostic system of Valentinus and Ptolemaeus as disciples. And now he's going to expose the faith in contrast to it. And he kind of sets forth a creed here and he repeatedly does that. He returns to simple things. He returns to simple things in the face of all of this complexity. The church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith, uniformity of the faith. This is on page 330. She believes in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. We see the importance of the creed here in that it was composed for the protection of the faith somehow

[15:10]

because these are the things that were being contested. And we lose sight of that because the creed is so far behind us. In one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit. So the three articles of faith are the three persons of the Trinity. Now we're going to notice that the way that Irenaeus talks about the Trinity is in a historical way. He sees the Trinity as acting somehow, working out as it were in three phases, the salvation of mankind and the recapitulation of all things. We'll see that as he goes on. And then he goes on, the kind of course, the itinerary of Christ. The Holy Spirit proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, the advent, the birth, the passion, the resurrection from the dead, the ascension in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus our Lord, and his future manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father, to gather all things in one. Now that word, gather all things in one, is the first occurrence that I've seen here of the word recapitulation.

[16:10]

So that's the key word in Irenaeus. It's anatephaliastai, is the Greek word. And Saint Paul uses it twice. He uses it in Romans. That's right. But we're going to have to talk about that word because it's got several levels, several dimensions of meaning. I want to find, first of all, the two places in Saint Paul. One is Romans 13. There's always one more sheet of paper than I can find. That's right. And that's the key place because the Romans one is really off the point as far as we're concerned. Yeah. The first one is Romans 13.9. And what Saint Paul says there is that he's talking about the commandments and virtuous living. He says, all these things are recapitulated in this one commandment, love your brother as yourself. Okay.

[17:11]

Now, that's one use of recapitulation, which doesn't come anything like the fullness of scope that Irenaeus is giving. So you can just sort of keep that one in. That's Romans 13.9, if you want to look at it later. Now, the key one is from Ephesians. This is where Irenaeus gets his notion of recapitulation. Ephesians chapter one. The closest thing to Irenaeus seems to be, besides John, it's those two letters, Ephesians and Colossians in Saint Paul. And the notion of the plural and also the Gnostics, you know, they went off in that direction. There's a curious axis that runs through Ephesus. Heraclitus or Heraclitus was supposed to be at Ephesus. It was a Greek philosophical place even before Christianity came along. Remember, John was at Ephesus according to tradition. Irenaeus says that John was at Ephesus. The letter to the Ephesians of Saint Paul is the one where this gnosis of Paul breaks out,

[18:13]

this cosmic unity of all things in Christ bursts out in that letter. You remember the letter starts out, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heaven and earth. Now what he's doing is recounting the work of God. According to Vagagene, when he took the course on grace, he used this as his basic text for explaining grace. He explained it in Trinitarian fashion. The work of the Father, the work of the Son, the work of the Holy Spirit, in three phases. In the first chapter of Ephesians. First the work of the Father. He chose us in Him. He destined us in love. In Him we have redemption through His blood. He has made known to us, that's the third phase, in all wisdom and insight, the mystery of His will,

[19:14]

according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time. It's kind of a solemn orchestration of this mystery of Christ, as Saint Paul talks about it. As a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him. Now, unite, that's the word. Recapitulate. Anikephalaiosta is the infinitive in Greek. And it means, recapitulate has that root capit, which means head. We don't have an English word which really carries it. Unite is not sufficient. Unite is very weak for that. It's the type of idea that Jesus is the head of the church. Putting Jesus back on the head of another man. Not only that, it's a very complex notion. He's got these different threads. Because He's the head, but He's also the center, and all things are in Him. So He's not an exterior head, in the sense that He's on top of Him. It's a summing up.

[20:20]

I think they must have used heading up. They must have had that notion. A column of figures, or to head up a subject in the end. Like when you say a chapter heading, where does that word chapter come from anyway? Caput, or capitulum, or something like that. It's the same notion. It's got more nuances to it. It starts out being oneness. It's oneness, but it's differentiable, because He's also the head. He's center, He's head, He sums it all up, and then Boyer talks about two dimensions of this summing up. One is He sums up all things in Himself. He sums up the whole creation in Himself. He brings it all together, unites it all. And the other is that He sums up the other line, the longitudinal line of the history of mankind, the history of the creation in Himself. Remember when Saint Paul talks in the same letter to the Ephesians about the length, and the breadth, and the height, and the depth? See, all of that somehow is connected with this recapitulation.

[21:22]

So there's a cosmic dimension in that He brings together everything in the world. There's the dimension of uniting everything in heaven with everything on earth, which means God with His creation. Then there's a longitudinal dimension, the length in history. That is, He takes the history of the planet from the creation, He takes the history of mankind from Adam and Eve, from the creation of man, and the fall, and all of that, and picks it back up, redeems it all. So the other sense that comes into it is this idea of gathering that which was lost. So it becomes quite a complex, quite a complex matter. It's got all these lives to it. He gathers up that which had been lost. He doesn't leave anything out. He gathers up matter, and He gathers up sin in some way. He gathers up that which has sinned. He's got all of that to it. Question from the audience Yes. Question from the audience

[22:30]

Well, Adam was the head in a sense, too. Adam was the head and contained all mankind and himself. So goes the usual theology in St. Paul and so on, the theology of original sin and redemption. But Adam contained virtually the whole human race and himself, so he headed it up in some way. You can say he capitulated it. Now, Jesus recapitulates it, but we have to be a little bit careful of the word we use. Now, we'll see as Ernest talks about it, we'll be able to bring out some of those dimensions more clearly. A word like this may seem to... I mean, you hit it and then you pass it by and say, okay, that's fine, let's go on to something else. But in a sense we never go on to something else because that contains it all. The problem here, I think, the quest is to get the center and then find how that center is attached to everything else. Now, the first name for that center is the logos, is the word itself. And the second name is this key term of Irenaeus, which is recapitulation. With its combining of heaven and earth, God and creation, its combining, uniting all the things in the creation,

[23:33]

and its uniting the whole of history, gathering it up sort of into eternity. We'll see that as we go on. Now, if you read those first chapters of the Letter to the Ephesians, you see that Irenaeus is very much in conformity with St. Paul. He's exposing St. Paul, he's sort of doing an exegesis of St. Paul, in a sense, and inserting his own insights, of course, but he doesn't step beyond what St. Paul is saying. Note that St. Paul doesn't use the word logos, which is curious. In fact, you find, you have a sense after a while that John and Paul are coming very close together, and what's holding them apart? It's like there's a thin partition between the Gospel of John, the Prologue of John, and these letters, the Letter to the Ephesians, and that to the Colossians. And what's separating them? It's partly vocabulary, besides the fact that John has a kind of more eternal point of view. St. Paul is pretty much that way in the beginning of the Ephesians. But Paul doesn't use the word logos, as far as I know. He doesn't use it in this sense, of the Christ mystery. So the key term in Paul would be

[24:34]

either the mystery of Christ, or simply in Christ. To say in Christ for Paul means in the logos, in logo. Maybe, what is it, 40 years? Between the writings, say, of... Although, I don't know about Ephesians and Colossians, you know, what time they were, the 60s or 70s? That's the general assumption. Yeah. But that seems to be the most... It's obvious that... If you take the analysis of... If you don't know the writings, you know, theoretically, you do believe that in some times the tradition which is perhaps open is not. And so it's not much use talking about it in this document. That's right. It's not like John only comes into being at the end, you know, at the time of the final reduction. According to Brown, there are four or five stages. I think this demonstrates that... The general assumption is that Paul was a younger man than John,

[25:36]

but that Paul finished his final drafts of his epistles before John finished the final drafts of the Gospel of John. Okay, about their relative age, I don't know, but about the dates of the writings, that's true. But the final draft of the letters of Paul, even to the Ephesians and Colossians, is certainly a good deal earlier than the final edition of John's Gospel, which they put somewhere around 90 or 100 A.D. Okay, now that mystery of Christ in Saint Paul, which is the content of his gnosis, you remember we find that in Ephesians and Colossians. I won't go into it more now, but we might find reason to return to this, to Saint Paul later on for more analysis. Now, this plan which God has made known to us, a plan for the fullness of time, notice that the notion of fullness, it sort of booms out at you in these two letters of Paul,

[26:38]

the plural, plural means fullness, or to fill all things, you know. Remember how it comes out in Ephesians 3, that he may fill the world with fullness of God, that he may be, and so on. For Christ rose, he who descended, is the one who also ascended, that he might fill all things. That's the glory of Christ, which forms his fullness. The fullness of the fullness of the world. In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things, according to the counsel of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory, and so on. Okay, so that's the source of Irenaeus' term, recapitulation. Now let's look at how he uses it. He loves to use it. Sometimes he'll use it three or four times in the same text, you know, just a couple of paragraphs. To gather all things in one, and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race, now that raising up that way

[27:41]

is a recapitulation itself. You see, the body is raised up in its head. In order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord and God and Savior and King, according to the will of the Invisible Father, every knee should bow, sings in heaven, and so on. And that's from Philippians 2. Remember, that's also Paul. After the kenosis, then there's the filling. The kenosis and then the plural. Okay, and then he has this power of judgment, and so on. Now number two. As I have already observed, the church having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet as if occupying but one house. That's beautiful. And behind that, of course, he's got the image of the church as a house, as a temple of the Lord, as a body, which is very strong in Scripture. Carefully preserves it. She believes these points just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down with perfect harmony, as if she possessed only one mouth. Although the languages of the world

[28:43]

are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. Now, we're so used, maybe, to hearing things like that, and we've had such an authoritarian use of that language for such a long time that it's hard for us to hear what he's really saying. But it's like he's observing it. He's seeing the marvellous unity of the faith, which is an organic being. The faith is the life of an organism. And just like the life of an animal or of a human being is one thing, so he can see, it's an empirical observation, but it's so in the Church, that this faith is one and it beats with one beat. Yes, I can assume that the higher up is taking deep, deep in himself. The higher up is putting on his new sleeve... He's got another language, hasn't he? Yes, yes. Yes. Later on, he refers to the apostolic succession.

[29:52]

He wants to give a kind of criteria, a checkpoint. He's talking about another Church. Yes. I wish I knew more about it. I wish I was able to say what his idea of Church was. A common understanding of the notion of Church. I don't know if they had an image, other than the biblical images, but it was those who believed in Christ and who were somehow united by certain, also certain, you have to call them institutional bonds, but certain visible bonds at that time. And for him, it's the bishops, as for Ignatius, I think it constitutes a visible bond. The bishops and the Eucharist and the same teaching, okay? So those three things. The bishops, the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, which is the sign of communion.

[30:53]

And if you were outside, if you were, say, heretical or something like that, then that would be breaking of communion, that would be a sign of it. And the one teaching. The connection between Eucharist and bishop is a liturgical one. And it's in some way

[31:55]

verified by experience. That is, that being together with the bishop in the Eucharist is, for them, an experience, even though they may not use the word, which has a kind of authority about it, I think, that very experience. This is why I can't say on my part of the Eucharist it would be a good thing to instill the institution of the Eucharist. I've tried it on a few places I've seen. It's part of the catechumen. John. This is something that Elio de Ravigna has been very helpful to me. He's been watching the topology of the study of the Proverbs. There's a section in here about Irenaeus' theology, about ecclesiology, which has to do with the relationship with the Church. There's a quote from this thing about false promises. Did you catch the quote about false promises? Irenaeus against Heracles

[32:58]

really isn't a good topic. It's not really Captain Heracles, it's Captain False Promises. There's a paragraph there. Go ahead, read it. Thank you. This is four lines of Aquinas introducing the quote of Irenaeus. Even the ecclesiology of the study of the Church, the religion of the Church, of Irenaeus, is linked up with this theory of the epitulation. God sums up in Christ not only the past, but also the future. Therefore, He made Him the head of the entire Church in order to perpetuate through Her His work of renovation, renewal, until the end of the world. And this quote is from Book 3, Chapter 16. Thus there is one God the Father, as we have shown, and one Christ Jesus our Lord, who comes by universal dispensation and recapitulates all things in Himself.

[33:59]

But in all things man also is comprised, a creature of God. Therefore, He recapitulates man in Himself. The invisible is become visible. The incomprehensible is become comprehensible. And the impassable is now passable. The loveless is become man, recapitulating all things in Himself. Thus, just as He is the first among heavenly, and spiritual, and invisible things, so also is He the first among visible and corporeal things. He takes the primacy to Himself, and by making Himself the head of the Church, He will draw all things to Himself at the appointed time. Yeah, good. We're going to get to that one in a little while. I think that's chapter 16, isn't it? Let's read that. That's a key text where he uses that term recapitulation about four times. Now, regards ecclesiology,

[35:01]

that is the other side of the notion of the Church for our mass, I think, which is the totality of this which is gathered together, okay? So, let's call it on the theological side, or on the theoretical side, that more interior, invisible side, the Church is the totality of that which God is bringing together in Christ, in the Word. But on the visible side, it's kind of got those three dimensions to it, of the teaching, the sacrament, and the bishops who are the successors of the apostles. And we're going to run into that continuity of the apostolic discussion in a few minutes. Okay, now we're in number two here on page 331. And he uses an image which I think is very important. But as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere and enlightens all men who are willing to come to a knowledge of the truth.

[36:02]

So he compares this faith of the Church and this revelation to the sun shining in the sky. Now as I've repeated ad nauseam until you're tired of it, I think that the best image for the Logos actually is the sun shining in the sky. And that's where Irenaeus is at really. That's what he's saying is that the simplicity and the power of the revealed Logos is comparable to the sun shining in the sky, which is a public fact, okay, which is a kind of single public revelation which is carried on by the Church right out in the open, as it were, by the one Church, which pulls all things together and is so obvious that it's mysterious. It's got the mystery of the obvious to it, which is not to say that it doesn't have mystery, it does. But it's the mystery of daylight, as it were, the mystery of the sun. Let's keep this, hang on to this image of the sun because it will come back again and again. Clement of Alexandria is the one who loves to use the image of the sun for the Logos. Remember,

[37:03]

we were talking about Sunday, Dia Solis. He's the one who really zeroes in on that. Irenaeus doesn't stress it so much, but here it is right at the outset. He's got it in the back of his mind. The Word of God, which is Christ, raised into the heavens is the sun. And now the truth is there in front of you and it's up to you. He says, you know, pick it up or make one of your own. The obviousness also of the creation, you see, the sun shines on all the creation and all the things that God has made are illuminated by this sun, which unites all things rather than dividing them, as these pseudo-Gnostics do. Okay, then he goes on about their methods of exegesis and so on. No matter how bright the teachers or the bishops are, they don't teach doctrines different from these, for no one is greater than the master. The thing about the Gnostics was it usually had different classes of faithful. Remember, you had the insiders, the esoteric people, the elite. The Gnostics themselves were really new.

[38:03]

You know, they had the inside knowledge and then you had the kind of inferior stuff that was taught to everybody and it was passed down in public. But Ernest says, no, it's not so. You don't have those grades. Grades of intelligence don't give you a different kind of knowledge of the faithful. And you don't have the insiders and the outsiders. You don't have a kind of inferior public revelation and a superior private revelation. He comes to that specifically there. For the faith being ever one and the same, neither does one who is able at great length to discourse about it make any addition to it, nor does he who can say but little diminish it. Gregory the Great likes to talk in that. So degrees of intelligence don't change the subject matter of the faith. Think of the one word, okay? The one word. It's like somebody pointing to it. It doesn't matter whether he points with a long finger or a short one, whether he points a little wider. The word is there. It's one, like the sun on the sky. You can't add anything to it. You can't really take anything away from it. You can hinder people from seeing, but that's about it. It's got its own power.

[39:05]

Now, then he goes on to say, well, there's something else here. These are the two abuses that are continually creeping up. One, to invent another God, to divide God, divide the Father, and the other is to divide Christ. And the two go together, right? Because the reason for dividing God, for thinking up another God beyond the God that we know, beyond the creator, is because you're not happy with the creation. In other words, you're not happy with the way things are, so you have to invent a kind of super-category, a kind of escape hatch. It's a spiritual escape hatch. Or it's a way of bypassing what's in front of you, bypassing the creation, bypassing life. Now, why would one invent another Christ? For the same reason. The other Christ provides you with the same bypass, the same escape hatch into the transcendent, without going through what's in front of you, which is life, which is the world, which is reality, which is matter, which is the body, which is the cross, all of those things. So they have to eliminate all of those and make this spiritual kind of tube that you get through. And that's what they do

[40:08]

by separating the Christ from Jesus the Saviour who is in front of them. Now, here he goes on to talk about what theology can be. This next paragraph is the explanation of what a person can do when explaining the faith. Boyer makes quite a point of this text. Notice what kind of thing it is. Now, this is another one of those texts that can just weigh on us because it seems so monotonous. It seems like we've heard it so many times. Why are they repeating these things to us? Bring out the meanings of those things which have been spoken in parables, accommodate them, explain the operation and dispensation of God connected with human salvation and show that God manifested on suffering. Set forth why it is. Now, he's got a whole string of why is there. In other words, instead of rejecting part of reality and devising a God which is higher than all of this, beyond it, as your God and your Christ, you accept what exists, accept what's there and then try to explain why it's there. Now, what are you doing

[41:08]

when you try to explain why it's there, why reality is there, why reality, why Revelation is there the way it is, why the Word is there, why God's work in Christ is the way it is? Instead of changing it, what are you doing? You're showing the beauty of it. You're showing how it fits together. It's not just a matter of causality, it's a matter of harmony. Because when Irenaeus does that, he does it in a rather musical fashion, not just a logical fashion. When he talks about this recapitulation of the successive stages, there's a kind of a ringing to it, there's a kind of a harmony to it as he shows, once again, this kind of sphere of God's, this luminous sphere of God's work, the simplicity and its beauty which are one. So the wise are connected with an aesthetic, with beauty, not only with logic and truth. The two are inseparable. And then this is exactly what he's going to be doing as he unrolls his own theology in the course of the five books here. And then he goes,

[42:09]

he ends up with this kind of doxology, this exclamation of St. Paul, oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. But the skill of the theologian is not in this that anyone should, beyond the creator and framer of the world, conceive of the enthymosis of an erring aeon. Remember, that erring aeon is Sophia, and the enthymosis is her thought, is that hakamoth which trails off out of the poem and goes astray, and which is supposed to be the source of the demiurge and then the creation, it's a strange fragmentation of that. Now, does it consist in this that he should again falsely imagine as being above the creator, which is the demiurge, remember? The creator for for Valentinus was a demiurge, and this is the real one. I may be deluded because it's supposed to be the rest of it. And a quorum

[43:12]

is its own thing, its own big circle. So the creator is outside of that quorum, outside and inferior to God's own sphere. At one time it's supposed to contain thirty and another time and another over five aeons. You've got thirty in there. The end of this, you don't have the next page, the end of this goes like this. As these teachers who are destitute of truly divine wisdom maintain, while the Catholic Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world, that's the end of this sentence. The Catholic Church possesses, it ends with pause there, one and the same faith throughout the whole world. They seem to have a multiplicity of schemes and also a multiplicity of sections and divisions within each scheme. Now the danger, of course, of speaking a lot about the unity of a faith is that you can repress any pluralism or any speculation in thought.

[44:13]

So we can talk about that later, what happens next. See, Pagel's contention is that with Irenaeus you get orthodoxy coming down real hard and squeezing out more creativity than theology and in Christian thought. We can ask ourselves about that. Sophia does sort of get sent out into... She sort of disappears in orthodoxy at this point. It's hard to find her again inside the Christian tradition. She's in Jewish mysticism and then reappears maybe in other forms in Christianity but not in the main. Any comments or questions? The Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world. I think that's true we don't quite get that but it's not so much that the Church confines the faith and people are excluded but I think it's a process

[45:14]

of extending the faith or extending the faith all. What about the possibility of different expressions of the faith? Now this is a very current problem today. Can different cultures and different nationalities and different religious traditions really have different theologies? Can they have different expressions of the one Catholic faith? Is that possible? It's as many languages and so on. I mean, what he means by being the same doesn't mean to say the same thing in words. All the time we think these things

[46:15]

as kind of short rule of thumb things but that's not at all what he's thinking about. The dynamic is being right in the center of the being carried up into God so the concept of that's what he's saying. So the basic sameness that he's talking about is the same core experience of Christian faith which then is kind of expressed in the one God, the one Christ, the one work of God in his spirit. That sameness has to be. And then the way it's done doesn't mean it's done professionally in the United States. I don't understand the way it's done professionally in the United States. We have

[47:16]

different ways of showing our love to God and of course you can see it in Christian America in small ways and all kinds of different ways of showing our love to God. don't understand the way it's done professionally in the United States. I don't understand it's professionally in the United I don't understand the it's done because you can see it in the United States. I

[48:17]

understand the way it's done professionally in the United professionally in the It's true, but certainly the experience of each of us is quite different and yet there's a commonness in that experience which makes us Christians. For that I'd like to recur to the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, and remember when Peter goes to those pagans, those Gentiles, they're not Jews, they're Gentiles, it was Cornelius, wasn't it, and so on, and the Holy Spirit falls on them, and their experience somehow is visible to everybody else, they've had the experience, therefore they're Christians just like we are, okay, at that point, that was a decisive point, even though they don't

[49:18]

think like we do, they don't know what we know, all of that, they're the same as we are because they've had that experience and it's visible to us. So there was a verification like that, and that was the key, if they had the Holy Spirit in that way, with that fullness, that went with baptism, then they're the same as we are. But in general, I think, like Irenaeus knew whom he was dealing with, and he knew these other fellows, they were close together, and he knew that they really had a different experience, that somehow they had strayed from the Christian experience. Okay, when we talk about experience, it's very difficult to speak about it, okay, because

[50:25]

experience is in itself incommunicable, I think. But something must be outstanding that may be similar to what you're talking about. Okay, first of all, I think it's the deliberate breaking off from certain things which were felt to be inalienable. One was the doctrine itself, okay. If somebody comes to you with a really strange scheme, and he thought it up himself, or he just met somebody down on Route 1 and thought it up, you know, and he comes up to you with this thing and he says, here, I've got the right version of Christianity, what do you think? Secondly, they broke off from the church in the sense of obedience to the bishops, I think. That fact is maybe not number one, but it was there. They broke communion somehow, okay. And that was part of succession, and that's very important. And it comes out later on that they denied the validity of the scriptures, okay. In other words, they would say, well, the scriptures are partly spiritual and partly

[51:26]

carnal, partly psychic. Now, we're going to tell you what the spiritual part is. So they dig into the scriptures and they throw away what they didn't want, you know, and they find a kind of kernel and say, well, this is it, but only we know about it, that kind of thing. That's right. Yeah, well, that's what Irenaeus is pounding at all the time, okay. So those doctrinal things are clear enough. The other things, sometimes there were moral things, but not always. Sometimes these Gnostic people could live very good lives, it seems. It seems even sometimes they were bad people, too. Yeah. Sometimes they wanted to keep it a secret, because they didn't want to talk to the bishops and all that. Evidently. Because sometimes they wanted to keep it a secret lest they be rejected. But on the level of experience, it's perhaps impossible to say, no, they did, but you can only see by the proofs, as it were. What about when you see that Irenaeus called the Holy Spirit to be seen?

[52:32]

That's right, he does. Yeah. Notice that that's something that fluctuates. Some people call the Word, who call Christ to be seen by God, and some people call the Holy Spirit to be seen by God. And then sometimes, in more modern times, they thought of wisdom as being some kind of combination of Word and Spirit, some of the Russian. When Irenaeus calls the Holy Spirit wisdom, it's as if he's deliberately rejecting that Sophia and Acoma, that Valentinian's talking about, okay? So he short-circuits that by going right back to the essence. That mysterious feminine figure of Sophia has always been a problem, has always been a real mystery. His vivid promise goes back to the Babylonian tradition, where he said that the Holy Spirit is the presence of Christ, and that's the assumption. He said that he is Acoma, he is not... The Logos is within the Spirit in some way, so you can't even consider the Spirit in isolation.

[53:38]

We try to make a scheme. We think, well, here's the Word, and then here's the Spirit, and how do they differ? But in the practical, just as we don't know God except through the Logos, except through the Word, and we don't know the Word except through the Spirit, you can't even think of the Spirit somehow without the Word. Because as far as we're concerned, the Spirit always contains the Word, brings the Word to us. We don't know the Word without the Spirit, we don't know the Spirit without the Word. It is that in which the Word comes to us since the Ascension, since Pentecost. There's a grander point which relates to this kind of thing, and I was going to say in the answer to what Father Hickson said, because it's very difficult for Father Hickson to hear that, because there is a bit complicated about the Word, and we need to look at it, which is not as far as we take our knowledge, without looking at it, we can't describe it. It's a pity that there wasn't more of a poetic expression that was able to maintain

[54:45]

the tradition of the Spirit's insight. That got pushed away. We were left with some abstractions or analogies. Yes, that's a good thing. I can definitely watch everything, and when I was down in Canterbury last time, I was about to visit him, and he said that in his experience it was very interesting that only the Japanese had a spontaneous conception of sacred space. Probably because it's just like any other kind of museum, and there are lots of objects in there. It's not that there is sacred space, it's just that the Japanese didn't have it. The Zen people have a particular sense of space. I remember talking to Baker Roshi one time. He started talking about space. He said, well, in the West we think about enclosure, and we didn't think about the building. The Japanese would see it as a space. Probably, that's as far as I can go this morning, we did one text.

[55:52]

Those papers that I passed out to you, let me give you the references for those, the parts that I think are worth looking at, in case you get a chance to look at them in between, before next week. First, we touched Book 1, Chapter 10. Okay, we did that one. Then there's... I was going to refer just for a moment to Book 1, Chapter 22 on page 347. I don't think you have that. So you can skip that one. I'll just read a bit of it. Then there's Book 2, Chapter 28, which is a very rich chapter. That's what I gave you today. It's on those pages 399 and 400. Book 2, Chapter 28, the numbers that you have there. Next time we'll talk about that. And then I also gave you page 428 on the following page, which is Book 3, Chapter 11,

[57:00]

Numbers 7 to 9, where he talks about the four Gospels. He talks about why the Gospels are four, and then, surprisingly, he talks about four heretical tendencies there, which go, as it were, in the direction of the four Gospels. And remember the four living creatures and so on from Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation. As far as I know, that's the first time this comes up in the Fathers, the Good and the Bad. So, you wouldn't want to pass it by. So we'll pick that up next time, too. Okay? Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. By the way, the latest successor to Irenaeus, I think, is Teilhard de Chardin. If you read certain of his writings, you find a direct continuity with his Logos. Remember, the Logos is forming history in Irenaeus, and in Teilhard, he doesn't use the word Logos for it, he uses the word word sometimes. It's forming evolution.

[58:00]

In other words, it's forming history even in the cosmic way. And he really picks up Irenaeus' thought. I don't know whether it's conscious or not. Yes, yes. But it's the same thought and the same excitement, in a way, that Teilhard has. And also thinking of the Logos, the word aspire. It's one of his last writings that's come out. I had a little of it. I'll read you just a little. Radiant word, blazing power. You who mold the multiple so as to breathe your life into it. You almost hear it in Irenaeus. I pray you, lay on us those your hands. Remember the hands of God. Powerful, considerate, omnipresent. Those hands which do not, like our human hands, touch now here, now there,

[59:02]

but which plunge into the depths in totality, present and past, of things, so as to reach us simultaneously through all that is most immense and most inward within us and around us. And Teilhard's doctrine is a doctrine of recapitulation. And with the accent on the cosmic, on matter itself. And you know how Irenaeus insists on matter, in terms of the human body mostly, in terms of the creation. Alleluia.

[59:26]

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